A Time To Read

My schedule has changed and I find myself with more free time than I've had in recent memory. Having spent the last 15 years of my life without a television, I cannot seem to work up an interest in my new roommate's favorite programs so I tried turning my attention to books. I can't remember the last time I was able to keep up with contemporary fiction and I was excited to settle in to some stories that I've heard so much about lately.

At the airport bookstore I picked up two recent Pulitzer Prize winners- The Road and Middlesex- and the bestseller The Lovely Bones (the store had a buy 2, get 1 free sale going on at the time). I was utterly mystified. While Middlesex was at least entertaining, the other two were so bad that I could hardly get through them, I found myself skimming over long sections of prose, just to get the pain of reading over more quickly.

The Road was a typical dystopian post-apocalypse scenario with the catch here being- wait for it-- they don't specifically say that the conditions were caused by a nuclear explosion. Thus, we don't know for certain what caused the current situation- WWIII? A virulent disease? Space aliens? Do we care? Not really. Oh, and also, he doesn't use quotation marks. If you've seen Mad Max, you can guess not only the major plot elements but also probably a few of the more important scenes.

The Lovely Bones, while marketed as adult literature, is actually a novel written for teenaged girls. Complete with boys and acne and a parental divorce. Yes, the main character is dead, but once you get over that conceit the book is full of mawkish characters and tedious episodes of suburban life.

Is this the kind of tripe people want to read? At least Middlesex contains complicated characters and intricate plot twists. Personally, I thought the book dragged a bit in the last third, but perhaps I was just still reeling from the two previous episodes of literary bludgeoning that I'd just experienced.

Thankfully, I also came upon The Solitudes, by John Crowley. This is a re-release of a novel that was originally published in 1987 as the first of a four part cycle called Aegypt. This is not the first work by Crowley that I've read- his novel Little, Big is one of my favorites, and his collection of short novels called Otherwise has some real gems- but it does not disappoint. Crowley is a sci-fi fantasy writer- Little, Big won the prestigious World Fantasy Award for best novel- which is not a genre that I usually enjoy. Still, it's not the fantastic that draws me to him, but the purity of his writing. His novels are dense with history and I seem to spend an equal amount of time with Wikipedia as I do with the book itself. Little, Big takes place in present day upstate New York, but the 12th century German King Barbarossa plays a major role. Here in the solitudes we follow the young professor Pierce Moffet through the tumultuous 70's. Woven throughout this modern tale is the story of the 15th century featuring mathematician/astrologer John Dee, Italian monk and martyr Geordano Bruno, and a young struggling actor named Will Shakespeare.

Check out this exerpt. The character was unexpectedly waylaid (due to a mechanical failure on a greyhound bus) on a trip from NYC to a small college in upstate New York. He ended up spending the night in a small town, missing an interview but starting something more important:

"He would think of it often, in different ways and in different contexts; he had already begun to think of it in the frigid airless bus passing away. And- on city streets, still violent with summer, foul with loathsome summer; in his tower apartment, grown too large now as the suit of a wasted strveling; or when steeling himself for the task he now knew lay ahead- he would sometimes feel those scenes he had visted lying just behind him, a pool of golden light, so close that he was uncertain just how he had traveled from there to here: to here where he supposed he must now be for good, or as nearly for good as made no difference.

Unfortunately, The Solitudes is not really a stand-alone novel but truly the introduction of the series. Fortunately, the following three books are available, the final fourth novel having only been published in 2007. Unfortunately, I hear the rest of the story does not maintain the high standards set by this one. I'm betting they're better than The Lovely Bones, though.

Ode to Corvidae

Where I am currently (temorporarily) living, they've got Magpies, Steller's Jays and Crows. I grew up with Steller's Jays- a pair of them nested outside my bedroom window all through high school and they acted as my 5 o'clock alarm. Here, they come right down to the back porch and scold the cat through the glass door. She ate their hatchlings this summer, and I'm convinced that, while they probably don't understand the details, they remember a greivous offense. Steller's Jays are named after one of my favorite naturlists, Georg Wilhelm Steller, who lived in the first half of the 18th century and left his name on a long list of animals in Eastern Russia and Western North America. His namesakes include the Steller Sea Cow (a now extinct 25' long 10 ton manatee-like creature that lived in the Behring Sea), the Steller Sea Lion (weighing in at 3 tons, they are the largest eared seal, found from Russia along Alaska to central California), the Steller Sea Eagle (the world's heaviest bird at 15-20lbs, found in Russia and Japan), Steller's Eider (a sea duck found in Russia and Alaska), Cryptochiton stelleri, the Gumboot Chiton (a giant- 13"- lumpy looking mullosc found along the shores of the Northern Pacific), and Artemisia stelleriana, a species of wormwood.

Anyway, back to the corvids. We had American Crows where I grew up as well, and they were a common sight by the side of the road or in parks and beaches. One time my dog caught a crow in the back yard. We were sitting in the living room and suddenly realized the sky was black with hundreds of crows (a "murder" of crows). There was the dog, crouched in the middle of the yard with an uninjured bird in her paws. She was frozen in fear. We called her in the house and eventually the birds dispersed. I have never seen so many birds at one time and I have no doubt they they would have soon begun to attack her and the results would not have been pretty.

They've got magpies here too- a crow sized bird and the prettiest corvid I've seen with their iridescent green tails and flashing wings. I've got no other experience with magpies, but they share the corvid wit and bravery, strutting along the street, throwing sidelong glances at cars and pedestrians.


My favorite of the corvids is the Common Raven. People often don't understand the difference between ravens and crows, and certainly from a distance they both simply look like a black bird. However up close or in comparison, the differences are striking. A mature Common Raven is between 22 to 27" in length, with a wingspan of 45 to 51"! Compare this to the crow which is 16-21" with a wingspan of 33-39". This is like mistaking a hawk with a pigeon. The raven's beak is much heavier and thicker than a crows as well. Ravens nest in groups (an "unkindness" or a "terror" of ravens) of up to 800 birds and are monogamous, sometimes for life. They have over 50 distinct vocalizations, sounding at various times like a gurgling toilet or a purring cat.



To the Native Americans where I live, Raven is a a trickster who brought fire to man and hung the sun and moon in the sky, he created lakes and rivers and taught man many tricks and skills for surviving in an unforgiving environment. However, in other cultures, raven is unmistakebly associated with evil. During the military invasions and plagues throughout Europe in earlier centuries, the raven dined on human corpses, and they apparently loitered near the sites designated for human executions. The word “ravenstone” means a place of execution in old English. The Germans have a word, “rabenaas,” meaning raven's carrion, denoting a person who should be hanged.


Mythology aside, corvids are certainly one of the most intelligent animals on the planet. Based on a brain-to-body ration, corvid brains are equal in size to a chimp or a dolphin and only slightly smaller than a human's. While observers have often seen crows using tools to accomplish tasks, a recent study found that crows can use multiple tools for complex jobs. Their ability to imagine possibilities and draw conclusions is apparently more highly developed than apes.

Like so many things in life, our familiarity with corvids has bred comtempt. We are so used to seeing crows at the dump or jays raiding the birdfeeder that we rarely even notice them anymore. Then, when you're least expecting it, a raven will fly right over your head, the beat of his wings heavy in your ears. You will be drinking your morning coffee and glance out the kitchen window to find the bright black eye of a magpie, fascinated with your ritual. Don't forget that we share this life with other creatures and we do not know what goes on behind their gaze. Don't fall into the trap of believing that there is nothing going on outside our walls.

Walking home

Alces alces gigas, the Alaskan race of moose is the largest of all moose types- he stands 6.5' at the shoulder and can have antlers that span 6' across. Saw this fellow on the way home one day.

From Wikipedia:
A moose's body structure, with a large heavy body suspended on long spindly legs, makes these animals particularly dangerous when hit by motor vehicles. Such collisions are often fatal for both the moose and motorist. This has led to the development of a vehicle test in Scandinavia referred to as the "moose test" (Älgtest in Swedish, Elch Test in German). The term was invented by the Swedish motor magazine "Teknikens värld" for a test where the tested car needs to make a sharp S-turn at high speed. The term "moose test" came to common knowledge when Mercedes A-klasse badly failed the test and turned over. German reporters didn't see the relevance of the test, and the testers replied that that kind of maneuver was important when trying to avoid collisions with moose. The test was not referred to as moose test in Sweden prior to this incident, but simply as an evasion manoeuver test, intended to test the car's ability to perform an evasive manoeuver to avoid colliding with any obstacle suddenly occurring on the road. However, since the Swedish journalist talking to the German press didn't know what "evasive manoeuver test" would be called in German, he simply called it "Elch test" - which quickly spread in German media and then stuck. Generally, upon impact the bumper of the car will break the moose's legs. The main body of the moose will then collide with the windshield, often with disastrous effect to both motorist and animal. In a collision of this nature, a car's airbags may not deploy or be of much use if they do